Leadership - Know Enough To Criticize It?
The Plain Dealer can whine all it wants about Cleveland's leadership but for the last 40 plus years I've been an observer of the newspaper's leadership from inside (as a PD reporter) and outside (as a critic). Let me tell you, the paper's leadership I can attest has been absolutely putrid. Why?
Over and over, year after year, decision after decision, The Plain Dealer has been unable to take strong and independent positions on major decisions made by the town's elite. That's why. It's such an elemental requirement for a newspaper. However, it is such a difficult duty for a money-making corporate business.
I can't remember an important deal or decision of any consequence where The Plain Dealer has stood up to the real powers that be. It has been a go-along, get-along policy.
The PD has had the opportunities.
The PD always has had the quality reporters to do the job.
Yet the PD has failed. Abjectly failed!
The PD from the top bosses has failed to provide leadership that produces quality journalism that forces the political and civic leadership to make difficult -- if sometimes self-damaging -- decisions. Decisions that benefit most, rather than the very few.
I think of some of the excellent reporters who have passed through here. Quality people who left and took with them knowledge and desire to produce quality information. Journalists who found roadblocks here instead of "Go Forward" signals from their editors.
The paper's editors drove away exemplary journalists.
The PD didn't hold on to any of them. There were reasons the paper lost such good people. There were lessons learned by them. Not for the better.
Bartlett at the PD in the 1960s produced an incredible series on the Lima State Hospital. It revealed in the starkest manner the brutality of the hospital. Then Publisher Tom Vail made a deal with Gov. James Rhodes that the governor would correct the hospital and Bartlett would be called off the investigations. The investigation ended, not the conditions at Lima State, however.
Bogdanich documented and reported that Teamster boss Jackie Presser was an FBI informant and had received kickbacks, only to have the PD then make a deal with an organized crime figure to retract the story. Editor David Hopcraft, according to Jim Neff's book Mobbed Up, told Bogdanich that he understood nothing was wrong with Bogdanich's story but "The orders are coming out of New York."
New York meant the Newhouse family.
Neff reported, "Meanwhile, a copy of the retraction was mailed to Fat Tony Salerno, and the boss, pleased with his handiwork, forwarded it to the heads of the Chicago Mafia. Fat Tony wanted to show them that his candidate for Teamster president wasn't a stole pigeon after all."
Naughton headed a PD series that examined and determined that the 1968 Glenville Shootout was NOT an ambush of police (The PD previously had reported it as a "massacre of police.") The series was killed. Later, the New York Times sent a team to Cleveland and came up with the same conclusion as the Naughton team. The Times splashed it across Page One. The PD even censored the Times story it printed, eliminating two paragraphs that hid the possibility of police murders of blacks.
Tom Andrzejewski, now in public relations, once lost his beat for being “anti-management” for his coverage of a trial. An elite lawyer, S. Burns Weston, complained of Andrzejewski's coverage about a man who lost two legs in an industrial accident as too empathetic to the victim. What a crime!
Andrzejewski later got into trouble for writing unsympathetically about Dick Jacobs's opening gala for the Galleria, which had received city subsidies of a 20-year, low interest $3.5 million loan. The column was killed but appeared in an issue of my newsletter, Point of View.
We can go to more recent times, too.
You remember the paper's failure to be able to endorse John Kerry for President, though the PD editorial board’s decision voted to endorse Kerry. Publisher Alex Machaskee overruled the board. (What if a PD endorsement had helped Ohio go Democratic? Think we’d be in the mess were are in now?)
You'll also remember when former Editor Doug Clifton announced that the PD had "two stories of profound importance languish(ing) in our hands." He said, however, the paper wouldn't print the articles. The paper remained silent about the issues until the Scene published details of one criminal activity. The other has remained a secret.
And even more currently, the removal of music critic Donald Rosenberg from covering the Cleveland Orchestra because of his critical reviewing of conductor Franz Welser-Most provides another excellent example of curbing strong reporting when it disturbs the wrong people. The fact that Publisher Terry Egger sits on the orchestra board makes the action deeply disturbing and suggests an inherent conflict-of-interest on the part of Egger.
The announcement of Rosenberg's demotion in the PD revealed its editorial cowardice. It was made in a short item entitled "New assignments." Such are the ways of deception.
If you choke off journalistic aggressiveness you damage democracy. If you dishonestly limit reporters, you encourage weak, deviant and criminal leadership because it can count on no public exposure. Reporters themselves become self-censoring when suppressed by editors. Self-censorship becomes a reporter's disease and a sickness in a self-governing society.
It's all a question of whose hide gets gored. It better not be someone with power. That is the message reporters get from such decisions.
It's not possible to be a great but a timid newspaper. One doesn't result from the other.
"A free press should always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy for the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare," said Joseph Pulitzer.
He sets a tough standard to follow.
I wrote some years ago, "The PD 's failure to even examine Power in the community -- let along challenge it or present a countervailing influence -- tips the scale of justice and equality time and time again against the ordinary person and deforms its responsibility in its most important task -- to inform citizens in a free society."
I bring this up because PD editorial page director Brent Larkin criticized Cleveland's leadership in a recent column. He was talking about the decision by Eaton Corp. to leave downtown for prime land in the Chagrin Highlands. He blamed government officials.
In the article he claimed that the Beachwood site at Chagrin Highlands was never intended as a site to lure businesses out of downtown. In fact, Chagrin Highlands would have drawn more corporate offices from downtown if this area didn’t have such dismal economic woes.
I wrote elsewhere that such a shift by Eaton was preordained. Cleveland politicians -- with a cheerleading PD -- opened up virgin land in the lucrative Chagrin Road office corridor in 1989 by legislation. Later, as governor, George Voinovich's investment of some $138 million for an I-271 interchange and improvements made the land even more enticing to development.
'The Plain Dealer was all for opening these competing sites to eager developers. And now you can expect the PD to urge even more state and local welfare for Eaton Corp. You would think that providing the corporation with a prime location, aided by millions of dollars of infrastructure, would be enough. Eaton, however, has its hands out. Watch Gov. Ted Strickland and Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher add more welfare goodies for Eaton.
I remember when pumped-up former Publisher Tom Vail tried to claim the then Cleveland Plain Dealer to be so formidable that it was the New York Times of the Midwest.
God! Can you even expect anyone would have the audacity to make such a claim today? The skimpy offerings of the paper are hardly worth calling it a city newspaper.
You can see in present time how disreputable the PD is by its coverage of the medical mart and convention center issue. It has never put this mess under the microscope it deserves. It has allowed the County Commissioners and a few business "leaders" to try for years to engineer a stinky deal that could cost us $1 billion dollars and more.
How bizarre the medical mart/convention center battle has been.
Cleveland LEADERS haven't yet been able to settle the Convention Center issue, after more than five years of clumsy wrangling. Back in October of 2003 I called Council's action to go forward with the deal "blackmail" when it passed legislation for the center. Of course, it never went anywhere with that particular deal. It took Commissioners Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora to vote a quarter percent sales tax.
That still hasn't sealed a deal.
We don't know how much they have spent. But when the city was dealing with Forest City back in 2003 the city paid more than $100,000 to lawyers, not counting its own law department work. The County was funding the Cleveland-Cuyahoga Convention Facilities Authority at $400,000 a year before it put that body to death. Since the non-profit and private Greater Cleveland Partnership took over from the County presumably it has been paying the bills, although the County is on the hook for Squire, Sanders & Dempsey partner Fred Nance -- now being used by GCP -- for $175,000. No telling what other funds the County has been spending on this matter.
Soon we'll be talking big money for confusion rather than results.
Maybe it's time for action by the PD. Possibly another PD stern editorial chastising our leadership without naming the Joe Romans, Dennis Eckarts or the Ratners for their bungling. Standard procedure for the elite-loving Plain Dealer.
The editorial would be another joke of the PD calling for "Leaders" to get things done -- all the wrong things at that. Could you expect anything more from this useless voice?
A Tribute to Al Stern
Al Stern, a gentle, wise and courageous man -- that's the way I always saw him -- passed away recently leaving a legacy for us who remain to fight against injustice and for world peace.
A long-time peace activist Stern worked tirelessly with many organizations for civil rights, integrated housing and anti-nuclear and anti-war efforts. His efforts will obviously be missed greatly.
His work was honored at a memorial celebration that drew many prominent speakers, a tribute to his work. They included Sen. Sherrod Brown, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones and Councilman Jay Westbrook as testimony to his stature here.
A statement of his achievements noted that he and his wife, Mickey, "helped found the secular Jewish Sunday School in Cleveland, so that their children and other Jewish members of the community could learn about their Jewish heritage."
He showed great courage in speaking out against injustices as he saw them. There are so few who make such commitments.
"Al had a deep emotional attachment to Israel and its survival. He agonized about the wars and the violence and suffering on both sides. Because of his compassion and intellectual honesty he understood that the Palestinians were not being treated justly," the statement read.
He helped establish the New Jewish Agenda in Cleveland, a Middle East peace movement, after meeting with Jews and Arabs seeking peace with a Jewish and Palestinian state existing side by side.
We too often wait until our heroes are gone before we truly understand their contributions. It is so with Al Stern.
Ruth Emmer: A teacher of children and of us all
As you get older one of the pains is that you lose friends and people you admire.
On Sunday, I visited the Cleveland Heights library to get myself a book or two. As I entered I sadly observed a posting at the entrance. It noted that there was a memorial service for Ruth Emmer. I had missed any notice, having out of town.
Ruth, or Ruthie as she was known by many, had a smile that could melt the grumpiest of us. It radiated love.
"She loved raising her voice for justice, she loved marching for peace, she brought her smile to all of this," said a memorial statement.
She was a life-long activist in the highest tradition of those who seek justice for all.
A teacher of children, she was an example to all of us of how a life should be lived.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole roldoATroadrunner.com
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